by Pete Hautman
“Wes Larson.”
Debrowski spoke into the phone, “Wes Larson, with the BCA. How the hell should I know? Okay.” She read the number off the telephone, then hung up. “I think Carmen’s bleeding to death,” she said to Crow.
A siren sounded in the distance, getting louder. Crow said, “She’s not the only one.”
50
The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
—William James
“RUPE! WAKE UP! WE have to get out of here.”
Rupert Chandra erupted from a deep sleep, sat up quickly, his heart suddenly accelerated, his pulse drumming in his ears. “What? What’s wrong?” He threw off his covers; the room came into focus. “Polly? You scared me.”
“Good. Listen, put your shoes on. We have to go.”
“Why? What happened?”
“The girl is gone.”
Rupe took a moment to wipe his eyes, trying to think. Recent events assorted themselves in his mind. “The girl? Gone? What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s gone. She stole my Range Rover. We have to get out of here, Rupe. If she goes to the police, and they find us here … I can’t even think about it. Dr. Bell has a car we can borrow.” She pulled on his arm, causing a spasm of pain to travel from his wrist to his chest.
“Give me a moment, my sweet.” He drew a deep breath and stood up shakily. He still felt woozy from yesterday’s anesthesia. The floor appeared to be about ten feet below him. “I’m feeling a little tall,” he said.
“Rupe? Are you all right? You look pale.”
A lead weight had materialized inside his ribcage. “I’m feeling tall and heavy,” he said. His knees buckled and he fell forward, felt Polly catch him and lower him to the floor. He heard her shouting for Dr. Bell, and he heard the murmur of the Faithful and, closer at hand, the high-pitched keening of his cells.
Chip Bouchet, between oblivion and consciousness, saw himself as a throbbing moon of pain spinning through space. The sound of running feet and excited voices tugged him toward wakefulness. He opened his eyes and the floating, weightless feeling receded. The moon shrank and located itself in the vicinity of his scrotum. He lay there without moving for several minutes. The distant sound of voices was interrupted by an approaching siren, the siren was replaced by new voices. A few minutes later the siren reasserted itself, then a quiet descended upon the hospital. For the next half hour, Chip waited for someone to come to him, to bring him another pain pill. Apparently he had been forgotten. Maybe that was good. Other than to think about how much pain he was in, Chip’s mind had not performed a great deal of strategic mentation since his conversation with Polly back at Stonecrop.
Maybe he should do some reconnoitering. Get the lay of the land. It might even be possible to exfiltrate the arena. Very carefully, he rolled onto his side and swung his feet over the edge of the mattress, let them descend until he felt the cold floor on his feet. He stood up. Keeping his legs well apart, he waddled to the door of his room and looked down the hallway. Other than the fact that he was wearing some sort of blue cotton nightshirt, and that walking was incredibly painful, there appeared to be nothing to prevent him from exfiltrating.
Chip found a pair of paint-spattered coveralls and a painter’s cap in one of the storage closets. Ten minutes later, disguised as a house painter, he was walking with great care down the road with no goal other than to put as much distance between himself and Polyhymnia DeSimone as possible.
“Tell me about her.”
“Who? Flowrean?” Crow pulled out of the ACO parking lot.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know much about her. She works out at Bigg’s, she’s strong as a horse, and she wears a necklace strung with rotting goldfish. They smell pretty bad. Nobody likes to get too close to her.”
“I didn’t see any dead fish.”
“She wears them when she works out.”
“What was she doing there? Is she an Amaranthine?”
“I don’t think so. I saw her there when I went to that anti-aging sideshow. She got in some sort of altercation. As a matter of fact, that was what got me in trouble. I sort of intervened.”
“For a woman you hardly even know?”
“You know me. Damsel in distress, I’m there.”
“So how good do you know her?”
“Like I said, we both work out at Bigg’s. I’ve had maybe one conversation with her, ever. Look, I just spent half an hour answering questions for the cops. What’s your problem?”
Debrowski lit a cigarette, flicked the stick match out the window. “Maybe I’m feeling a little insecure.”
Crow looked at the woman sitting beside him. How could anyone wearing thirty pounds of leather and steel feel insecure? Or maybe it was the other way around.
“You’ve got nothing to feel insecure about.”
“Good.”
“We’re doing okay. You know who should be feeling insecure? Arling Biggie. Right about now a couple of cops are sitting in front of his place waiting for him.”
“Tell me about this conversation with Flowrean.”
Crow took a deep breath, held it as long as he could, then told her about his lunch with Flowrean. Debrowski listened, stone-faced. Midway through the story, Crow turned onto an I-94 entrance ramp, downshifted to second, and tromped on the gas. The GTO took four noisy seconds to reach cruising speed. Crow shifted directly to fourth gear.
“Feel better now?” Debrowski asked.
“A little.”
“Where are we going?”
“Over to Axel’s.”
“I thought we were going home.”
“Somebody has to tell him what’s happening with Carmen. I thought we should go over there.”
“Fine. So finish your story. Flowrean orders a salad and tells you she’s been following you everywhere. She followed you to the anti-aging thing, she knows where you live, the whole weird stalker deal. She’s in love with you. Then what?”
“I told her I was unavailable.”
“And?”
“She was fine with that,” Crow said, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
Debrowski laughed. Crow frowned. His face felt hot.
“You know what I love about you, Crow?”
“Don’t tell me. You love me for my car?”
Debrowski smirked. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “You got it first guess.”
A few years back, Hard Camera had aired an exclusive home video of bigfoot raiding a salt lick in Ely, Minnesota. The husband of the camera operator—Drew remembered his name as Slooch Nygaard, something like that—had taken a shot at it with his 30.06, but bigfoot had run off into the brush, apparently uninjured. The entire event had been videotaped at dusk, in a snowstorm, through a plate glass window, from a distance of approximately sixty yards, using a camcorder Mrs. Nygaard had recently purchased from the Wal-Mart down in Cloquet. The exceptionally poor quality of that video had been such that Drew Chance had been ridiculed by local media and viewers alike and had been flooded over the following weeks with “yeti-in-a-snowstorm” home videos.
The tape that had arrived by courier that morning was equally unconvincing. It looked as if the camera operator—Drew assumed it was that idiot Hy—had run the camera without the autofocus engaged and the shutter speed turned all the way up and the microphone turned off. The images were dark, fuzzy, and poorly composed. Drew thought he could make out a woman in a big white dress lying on a picnic table, squirming and shouting silently at the camera operator.
The camera moved in for a close-up of her arm. It looked like a red tube taped to the inside of her elbow, but he couldn’t be sure. The closer he got, the further out of focus the picture became. Drew hit the fast forward and watched another five minutes of visual gibberish, then turned it off. Hy the Guy. He should’ve known it would go nowhere.
Officer Brett Grossman rounded the corner at thirty miles per, the back wheels of the
LTD breaking loose as they left the pavement and hit the dirt, slewing around just so, bringing the squad car into perfect alignment with the camelback road. He punched the accelerator, sending up a storm of dust and rocks, and fishtailed up the dirt road, his steely blue eyes flicking from side to side, scouring the unbroken rows of corn.
This was why he had become a cop. A young woman was in danger, and Brett Grossman was on duty, pushing his equipment to the max. There were eleven other cops out combing the countryside. The cellular phone company had located her cell phone to within a five-mile radius of County Road 2 and East Circle Drive—nearly eighty square miles of land, a good third of it cornfield. Their best bet was the chopper, but the Rochester P.D. only had one. Grossman figured he had a good chance to be the hero. He had an instinct for these things. He could cover more ground than anybody. He knew the land; he’d grown up there. He knew just what to look for, the distinctive signature of an out-of-control vehicle leaving the road and plunging into a cornfield. Some of the guys he worked with would drive right by it, but not Brett Grossman.
He blew past the old Aamold place doing sixty, then turned back south toward County Road 2 and brought the Ford up to eighty, heading away from town. He passed a barefooted man walking along the shoulder wearing white coveralls and a painter’s cap. What was a barefooted house painter doing out here on County 2? Brett briefly considered checking the guy out, but first things first. He decided to stay on County 2 until he reached the perimeter of the search area, then circle back toward town on a network of farm roads that would take him through thousands of acres of corn. It was a good plan. Brett imagined himself receiving a commendation. The image was so vivid that he nearly missed the broken rows of corn to his right.
The limo was right where Flowrean said it would be. Bigg parked his Blazer at a meter across the street, grabbed the parking ticket off the limo’s windshield, and got in. The smell just about made him lose it—all those flowers had been sitting in there all day long, baking. He rolled down all the windows and cranked up the air conditioning. He would drive it back to the gym, then get somebody to give him a lift back downtown to pick up his Blazer.
He was trying not to think about what had happened at the Amaranthine Church. It was probably nothing. A few holes in a door. How much trouble could that cause? He was sure he hadn’t hit the guy on the other side. Even if he had, the bullets would be going pretty slow after hitting that door. He had other things to worry about, like what had happened to his other limo, smashed up in some place called Prescott. That was the next thing he had to be concerned about. By the time he reached the gym, the incident at the church had all but left his mind. He parked the limo and walked into Bigg Bodies, not even noticing the two suits get out of the gray Ford and follow him inside.
There was a white light ahead, warm and inviting. Behind him lay cold and noise and chaos. He felt hands, soft and dry, urging him gently forward. There was no pain. Not even a hint of discomfort in any part of his being. He realized now that for his entire life he had been in pain. There had never before been a moment when something did not hurt, if only a little.
Was ecstasy the absence of pain?
He felt himself moving forward, drawn by the light. As he moved toward it, it seemed to recede. The noises behind him became strident, insistent. He tried to speed up, to immerse himself in the light, to escape the jangle and confusion. Suddenly his chest exploded in an agonizing flash of light that left behind a cloud of smoky fog shot with blue sparks. The voices became louder, hurting his ears. He searched again for the light, trying to see through the roiling fog—there! A glimmer, but so far away now. He heard a man’s voice shout “Clear!” and once again a bomb went off in his chest. Rupe’s eyes popped open. He gasped, “No!” A man wearing a blue cotton cap and holding two metal paddles grinned and said, “We got him.” Rupe began to weep.
51
KIDNAPPED BY VAMPIRES, GROOM CLAIMS
—Pioneer Press headline
“—WITH MORE ON OUR story about the Minneapolis couple who were allegedly kidnapped on the way to their wedding. Tom? What do you have for us?”
“Thank you, Robin. I’m standing here in front of American Legion Post 684 in South Minneapolis where a wedding ceremony was scheduled to take place yesterday afternoon, until the bride and groom were apparently kidnapped in their limousine on the way here! According to police—”
Sophie grabbed the remote and hit the off button.
“What are you doing?” Axel said, lunging for the remote.
“It’s the same thing, over and over. I can’t stand it anymore!” Her eyes were red and wild. “Why can’t they find her?”
“Give me that!”
Sophie threw the remote at Axel and went out on the deck. Axel turned the TV back on. The news anchor was saying, “—No word on the woman at this time, but we did catch up with the fiancé for an interview you’ll see only on Channel Nine.” Hyatt Hilton’s face filled the screen.
Axel shouted, “Sophie! Hyatt’s on the TV!”
Sophie ran back inside. Hyatt Hilton was saying “—the next thing I knew, we were tied up in the back of the limousine being carried off.”
The image cut back to the news.
“And we’ll be airing the rest of that interview at five. And now here’s a story that’s going to make a lot of Twin Cities commuters happy—”
Axel turned off the TV.
“Was that it?” Sophie asked.
“Yeah. I guess it was just a teaser. They’re going to show the interview at five. Do you know what I wish? I wish I’d had a chance to see her in her wedding dress. I’ll bet she was beautiful.”
Sophie didn’t say anything.
“What did you say it was called? That dress?”
“The Madonna.” Sophie sat down on the sofa beside Axel and hugged herself. She looked small. “How can Hyatt be on TV? I thought the police were looking for him.”
Axel nodded. “The cops that were here were asking a lot questions about Hyatt. Like they thought he was the one responsible. Maybe they think if they find him they’ll find Carmen.”
Sophie said, “What if they don’t?”
Axel looked at the woman beside him, hardly recognizing her. He had seen Sophie scared and uncertain and angry, but never like this. Her face seemed to have collapsed, her red eyes had grown large and waiflike. She looked both older and younger, a frightened child in a body drained of youth.
She said, “What if they do?”
When Crow and Debrowski pulled up in front of Sophie’s, Axel was out on the deck cleaning his Weber. He looked up as they got out of the car, nodded, then continued to scrape at the grill with a metal spatula.
Crow said to Debrowski, “Don’t mention that Carmen is bleeding, okay?” He raised his voice and directed it at Axel. “Heard anything?”
Axel said, “Hyatt is going to be on TV. In an hour. They say that it was some sort of cult.”
“Have the police called you?”
Axel shook his head. “Sophie’s pretty upset.” He looked tired.
“I talked to Carmen,” Crow said.
Axel stared at him, his mouth moving soundlessly.
Crow climbed the three steps onto the deck. “I talked to her on the phone, less than an hour ago. She didn’t know where she was, but the police are looking for her. They know to call you here, don’t they?”
Axel nodded slowly and sat down on the bench. “How—why did she call you?”
“Joe called her,” Debrowski explained. “He got the phone number of the people who supposedly kidnapped her, and he called it and she answered.”
“She’s okay then?”
“The police are trying to find her.”
Axel stood up. “I have to tell Sophie,” he said. He went inside.
Crow followed. “Mind if I use your phone? I’ll give Wes a call, make sure they know to call us here.”
Shortly before five, the phone rang. Sophie picked up. “Hello?” She listened
, handed the phone to Crow.
“Crow here.” They were sitting at her kitchen table nursing cups of Axel’s powerful coffee. Sophie and Axel’s eyes were locked on Crow. Debrowski was out on the deck smoking.
“This is Wes. You called?”
“Yeah, I called about five times. Did you find her yet?”
“I return my calls, Crow. Yeah, we found her. She’s in Rochester General.”
“She going to be okay?”
“They aren’t sure. She lost a lot of blood. Listen, Crow, you heard from your buddy Hilton? I’d really like to talk to him.”
“Sorry, I haven’t seen him. Rochester General? You got a number?”
Ten minutes later, Axel and Sophie were in Axel’s pickup truck, headed south. Crow and Debrowski got back in the GTO.
Debrowski said, “Can we go home now, Crow? You’re supposed to be putting in sack time, let your brain heal.”
Crow nodded. He knew he was tired. His brain was numb, his face felt like a slab of meat, and his neck hurt. “Okay,” he said. “But first I gotta check something out.” He started the engine.
“I don’t think I like this.”
“One more stop, then we go home. I have an idea where Hyatt might be.” He guided the GTO through the narrow streets of Landfall, drawing looks of envy from middle-aged men and kids too young to know better.
“Why didn’t you tell Axel what Carmen said?”
“Might not be true. All she said was that pig-nose was a friend of Hy’s.”
“And she said, ‘Tell Hy I’m not gonna do it.’ That’s enough for me.”
“I want to talk to Hy first.”
“Why?”
“Right now, he’s all I got.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ve got no career, no calling, no mission in life. You feel guilty inhabiting your own lousy body sucking up all that free air, so you try to fix other people’s problems. You know what they call a person like that where I come from? A busybody.”
